“I came to believe that the nastiness of the internet was not a function of a technology or various things that have gone wrong, but the function of one particularly nasty media company led by a particularly sociopathic individual and that if I defeated Gawker, it would actually change the media land…”— Peter Thiel, amazon.com
“Even if we’re full of despair over what the internet has become, it’s good to remind yourself that it’s an amazing thing. In the habits that we enjoy, there are the seeds for the future. That’s where the good internet will rise up again.”— Nick Denton, fortune.com
“If Fox News had written about Peter Thiel being gay and his fund Clarium failing, would anyone be okay with its total destruction? (Even if that destruction was carried out by going after the network on other, unrelated stories that they got wrong, as Thiel did by financing multiple lawsuits against…”— Elizabeth Spiers, heatst.com
“If Thiel’s strategy works against Gawker, it could be used by any billionaire against any media organization. Sheldon Adelson, Donald Trump, the list goes on and on. Up until now, they’ve mostly been content suing news organizations as plaintiffs, over stories which name them. But Thiel has shown th…”— Felix Salmon, fusion.net
“I refuse to believe that journalism means massive privacy violations. I think much more highly of journalists than that. It’s precisely because I respect journalists that I do not believe they are endangered by fighting back against Gawker.”— Peter Thiel, nytimes.com
“It’s not for me to decide what happens to Gawker. If America rallies around Gawker and decides we want more people to be outed and more sex tapes to be posted without consent, then they will find a way to save Gawker, and I can’t stop it.”— Peter Thiel, nytimes.com
“Gawker is the hardest of our sites to define. It started out as a Manhattan media gossip site — and retains that initial personality. But that topic only appeals to 100,000 or so people. And Gawker.com now has a monthly global audience of 10m. It needs that scale to get internet advertising and to s…”— Nick Denton, gawker.com